Implicit
bias has recently received a great deal of high quality attention from
philosophers. Papers have probed their nature, how their effects can be
countered and their implications for ethics and for epistemology. In moral
philosophy, the question that has dominated has been whether agents are
responsible for actions partially caused by them. But little space has been
given to the question of how we are to characterize agents who harbor them. The
agent who is explicitly sexist is a
misogynist. But what about the agent who is only implicitly sexist? I explore
this kind of question, focusing on implicit racism (and supposing that my IATresults are accurate, and I harbor mild
implicit biases against Black people). In virtue of that fact, and given my explicitly
egalitarian attitudes, am I racist?

Obviously,
answering that question requires an account of what racism consists in. There are
a variety of accounts in the literature. Simplifying greatly, according to cognitive accounts of racism, to be a
racist is to have racist beliefs. According to affective
accounts, a racist is someone with racist emotional responses (say contempt for
members of other races), while behaviouralaccounts
emphases, naturally, behavior (obviously, disjunctive or conjunctive accounts
are also possible options). Rather than attempt to adjudicate between these
competing accounts, in my paper I explore how those who harbor implicit biases
stack up on each of them.

I can
appeal to my own earlier work in trying to ask whether those with implicit
biases count as racists on a cognitive account. There are various accounts of
what beliefs consist in, but the only one that is a viable contender for
showing that implicit biases are beliefs is one that identifies beliefs with
structured representations. If our implicit biases have the right kinds of
structural properties – which entail dispositions to inferential promiscuity
and evidence sensitivity – then they are beliefs, on this account. Most
psychologists have argued, or assumed, that implicit biases are structured
associatively but Eric Mandelbaum has shown that
they are wrong. Implicit biases interact with other attitudes in ways that
entail that they have some propositional structure. But we should not follow
Mandelbaum and conclude from the fact that they are not mere associations that they are
beliefs. Despite having some propositional structure, they seem to fall short
of being beliefs: they fail to respond to evidence when they should, if they
were beliefs, and also respond to stimuli when they should not. We can
therefore conclude that they are not beliefs.

They are,
however, beliefy: somewhat
belief-like. If the cognitive account of racism is correct, implicit ‘racists’
aren’t racists. But they’re not clearly not
racists, either. The right answer to the question “am I racist?” is probably
“somewhat”.

Something
similar, if weaker, is true on the behavioural account too. Implicit biases
matter, at least in the main, because they are implicated in behavior: even
well-meaning egalitarians may act in sexist or racists way due to their biases.
But explicit attitudes are much
better predictors of behavior than implicit. How much better is open to dispute: the lowest estimate holds that implicit attitudes account for only
2.2% of variance in behavior. Some people have concluded from this claim that
implicit biases don’t matter. That’s a mistake: at a population level, they
predict innumerable racist decisions and actions, and some of these actions may
be very significant (ranging from wrongly thinking that the male, or the white,
candidate is clearly better qualified than the female or the minority candidate
to opening fire on the suspect).Implicit
biases are not trivial, but they do seem to entail that those who are harbor
them are not, on behavioural accounts, racists. We are not, however, entirely
off the hook either.

It’s hard to know what to say concerning the
affective account of racism. Affects are, notoriously, resistant to top-down
control, which seems to suggest that they will tend to align with implicit
processes. But they are also often downstream of controlled processes: I feel
outraged, say, because I judge that someone has been treated unfairly. I know
of no evidence that allows us to estimate the relative contributions of these
different kinds of processes, and therefore of the significance of the role of
implicit processes in affect. In the absence of such evidence, I turn to the content of our affective responses. One
well-known test for implicit bias (the Affect Misattribution Procedure) relies on them triggering
affective responses. But it also relies on these responses being subtle enough
to misattribute to a neutral stimulus. The affects in question are certainly
normatively criticisable, but their relative mildness seems to fall short of
the kinds of affect that have been suggested to
constitute racism (such as hatred or ill-will). Again, the answer to the
question “Am I racist?” seems to be “a little bit”.

The accusation of racism rightly carries with a
great deal of moral freight. It is not one that we should level at one another
lightly. Nor, however, can we be complacent about racism, in ourselves or in
others. Even among egalitarians, implicit biases are common. Avoiding negative effects
on vulnerable others is obviously the most urgent task they set us, but to the
extent that we are racists we are also set the task of remaking ourselves.